Reducing gender inequalities to create a sustainable care system

Women mainly provide family care, but as women’s economic opportunities increase they will not continue to bear the costs of providing care unaided. To create a sustainable care system, care and carers must be better supported and more highly valued to involve more men in caring and reduce gender inequalities.Key pointsMost care is still provided through family obligations, unpaid but not free, since it is ‘paid for’ by reduced opportunities for carers. Family carers are mostly women, because of gender norms and also the gender pay gap, which makes it more costly for men to reduce employment hours.As women move increasingly into employment, family carers’ demand for employment will continue to rise, as will the need for paid care. The UK’s long working hours make it difficult to combine caring with full-time employment, but part-time pay rates are often considerably lower.Four in five paid carers are women, in a sector having increasing difficulties with recruitment and retention. The care sector’s poor pay is a large contributor to the gender pay gap.Privatisation of residential and domiciliary care has produced a labour market with insufficient opportunities for training and career development. This is unlikely to attract men, and women will increasingly leave as their employment opportunities improve.This situation will be unsustainable for meeting society’s care needs unless:- pay and conditions improve to retain more women and encourage men to enter the care sector;- unpaid carers receive financial and other support, and working hours are reduced for all, so that more people can combine family care with employment;- cash payments to individuals are not allowed to drive out funding for vital community services; and- policies are judged by the quality of care they support and how much they encourage a stable, less gender-divided workforce, as well as value for moneyAny other solution would be unworkable, unfair and inconsistent with government commitments to reduce gender inequalities.Costs will continue to rise as the paid care sector grows, since to recruit and retain care workers, wages will have to keep up with those elsewhere. Because rising care costs are an effect of rising productivity elsewhere in the economy, paying for them will still let disposable incomes increase. Spending more on social care can be afforded.</br

Women

This chapter examines the government's approach to fairness in its Comprehensive Spending Review and shows that it fails to acknowledge that men and women start from unequal positions, and that there are many barriers to social mobility other than lack of educational qualifications. Unequal employment opportunities and unpaid caring responsibilities are given as two examples. As a result women rely on public services to be able to combine care with employment and so cuts in public services have a greater impact on women's opportunities than on men's. This is shown to have been the case for the cuts in the Comprehensive Spending Review and figures giving the differential impact on various types pf households are given

Who Cares: Who Pays? A Report on Personalisation in Social Care

This report looks at the impact of recent moves towards personalisation of social care services and assesses their impact on providers, care recipients and gender inequalities more generally. It also provides an alternative vision for the provision of care in a more gender equal future

Reducing gender inequalities to create a sustainable care system

Women mainly provide family care, but as women’s economic opportunities increase they will not continue to bear the costs of providing care unaided. To create a sustainable care system, care and carers must be better supported and more highly valued to involve more men in caring and reduce gender inequalities.Key pointsMost care is still provided through family obligations, unpaid but not free, since it is ‘paid for’ by reduced opportunities for carers. Family carers are mostly women, because of gender norms and also the gender pay gap, which makes it more costly for men to reduce employment hours.As women move increasingly into employment, family carers’ demand for employment will continue to rise, as will the need for paid care. The UK’s long working hours make it difficult to combine caring with full-time employment, but part-time pay rates are often considerably lower.Four in five paid carers are women, in a sector having increasing difficulties with recruitment and retention. The care sector’s poor pay is a large contributor to the gender pay gap.Privatisation of residential and domiciliary care has produced a labour market with insufficient opportunities for training and career development. This is unlikely to attract men, and women will increasingly leave as their employment opportunities improve.This situation will be unsustainable for meeting society’s care needs unless:- pay and conditions improve to retain more women and encourage men to enter the care sector;- unpaid carers receive financial and other support, and working hours are reduced for all, so that more people can combine family care with employment;- cash payments to individuals are not allowed to drive out funding for vital community services; and- policies are judged by the quality of care they support and how much they encourage a stable, less gender-divided workforce, as well as value for moneyAny other solution would be unworkable, unfair and inconsistent with government commitments to reduce gender inequalities.Costs will continue to rise as the paid care sector grows, since to recruit and retain care workers, wages will have to keep up with those elsewhere. Because rising care costs are an effect of rising productivity elsewhere in the economy, paying for them will still let disposable incomes increase. Spending more on social care can be afforded.</br

The Impact on Women of the Coalition Spending Review 2010

This report provides a gender impact assessment of the Coalition Government's 2010 Spending Review

Examining public policy from a gendered intra-household perspective: changes in family-related policies in the UK, Australia and Germany since the mid-nineties

Public policy can affect many different gender inequalities. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the effects of policy on gender inequalities within households. This paper analyses a range of family-related policy changes over the last fifteen years in Australia, Germany and the UK to compare their potential effects on intra-household gender inequalities. These include changes in parental leave policies, working time regulation, childcare support and financial support to families. Many of these changes are found to have contradictory effects on within household inequalities, mainly because those that improve women’s incomes in their current gender roles may also undermine incentives to challenge traditional gender roles. All three countries have implemented substantial reforms over the period considered. However, with labour market activation policies tending to favour an inherently unequal one-and-a-half earner household, the effects on inequalities within households did not meet increasingly egalitarian gender role attitudes

Investing in the Care Economy. A gender analysis of employment stimulus in seven OECD countries

Our findings show that governments seeking to expand employment would do well to increase public investment in the economy and that there are strong arguments for more of this investment being in the caring infrastructure than is currently the case. Investment in the care industry, in addition to creating a higher number of jobs, would also address the care deficit and reduce gender inequality. Such a policy would contribute towards creating a more inclusive model of development as well as lifting economies out of recession

Shifting worlds of father politics? Comparing path-departing change in paternity and parental leave policy in Germany and the UK.

How families balance employment and the care of young children has become a focus of dynamic policy change in many high-income countries since the 1990s. While there has been a broad shift across the OECD away from male-breadwinner model work-family policy regimes, there is much variation in the extent to which policies targeted at fathers have been part of these changes. Seeking to examine this variation, this article compares two cases which both represent ‘late path shifters’ away from the male-breadwinner family model, yet whose trajectory in terms of ‘father politics’ are very different: Germany, which has adopted Swedish-style non-transferable periods of leave for fathers, and the UK, where leave policy has remained overwhelmingly focused on mothers. This article seeks to explain these different trajectories through an analysis of the role of ideas in the two processes of reform. Drawing on documentary analysis and interviews with policymakers, it argues that ideas about the role of fathers shifted substantially in Germany during the period of reform, while they did not in the UK. This difference is explained with reference to the political conditions which created similar but different windows of opportunity for change in the two countries, as well as the impact of existing policy legacies

Choice and the relationship between identities and behaviour for mothers with pre-school children: some implications for policy from a UK study

This article reports on the findings and policy implications of a UK study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate mothers' decision-making with respect to the interlinked issues of the care of their pre-school children and their own employment. Mothers were found to have both internal and external constraints on their decisions. In the three areas of finances, childcare and working time, both personal identities and external circumstances limited mothers' choices. However, neither external circumstances nor identities were fixed. Behaviour and identities were therefore adjusted to each other, giving rise to feedback effects at both the individual and the social level. While the constraints of identity limit the direct effectiveness of some policies, the long-term effectiveness of others may be enhanced by positive feedback arising from attitudes changing along with behaviour. A 'policy multiplier' is defined as the ratio of such indirect to direct effects. This is likely to be greater for enabling policies that lift existing constraints and enable choices that were previously not available, than for coercive policies that impose new constraints on behaviour. The article examines the implications of such feedback effects for developing policy that expands the choices available to mothers in the short term, reduces the costs of motherhood, and meets the government's long-term objectives of reducing child poverty and increasing employment